New Analytical Method for Improving Water Allocation Management in Water Flood Projects

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

Department of Petroleum Engineering, Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

Water production is one of the big challenges of oil and gas recovery. This excessive water production is a significant operational, economic and environmental problem. One of the main causes of water production is an improper water injection plan. Thus, the waterflood projects should be managed in a manner to delay the water breakthrough in producers as much as possible, and as a result improves sweep efficiency and increases the oil recovery. One of the proposed new approaches to an efficient waterflood project is the Water Allocation Management (WAM). Water allocation management aims to inject the water in a manner that increases the total oil recovery for a given volume of water. The good injectors are thus those which support the good producers. Inter-Well Connectivity of producers and injectors is an important parameter that affects the efficiency of allocation management in waterflood projects. Inter-well connectivity determines how effectively injection and production wells are connected to each other. One of the methods recently employed by petroleum engineers to measure this parameter is the Capacitance-Resistance Model (CRM). CRM assumes the reservoir as a system which gets an input signal (injection rate) and responses by an output signal (production rate). By analyzing these behaviors, a series of equations are written to correlate the output and input signals. In these equations, there are two main unknown parameters. The first one is the time constants and the second is the weight factors (well connectivity parameters). These parameters can be determined by history-matching the production/injection rates. After finding the unknown parameters, by employing the weight factors and the water cut from production wells, a new analytical algorithm is presented to calculate the allocated factor for each injection wells to improve waterflooding in order to increase the cumulative oil production and reduce the cumulative water production.
 

Keywords

References

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Journal of Petroleum Research
Volume 28, Issue 99 - Serial Number 99
July and August 2018
Pages 4-13

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